Double Reverse

by Tim Green

  Against his better judgment Clark looked at the clock. It was almost six now and the sheets were damp and tangled. A shard of sunlight lay across his blanket, illuminating a small flurry of dust motes, and Clark thought about all the stuff that went into your body that you never saw. His mind was up and running now at a breakneck pace, so he flung aside his tortured bedclothes and got up to brush his teeth.

  The other bed lay flat and empty, a reminder of how easy it was to lose your job in the NFL Bill Brown, better known to L. A. fans as "Deuce," had been a possession receiver for eleven years. A flamboyant, undersized wide receiver, Deuce had made a name for himself with toughness and tenacity. But a competent receiver corps and a third-round draft pick out of USC left him as the odd man out. Three days ago, with his Jaguar XJ8 loaded up and the top down, Deuce had pulled out of the hotel parking lot swearing with his final words that he'd never do another day's work in his life.

  Clark thought about that as he spit into the sink. It sounded good after four weeks of brutal training camp. But how long could you get along just surfing and playing golf and sleeping till noon before it drove you out of your mind? Clark was in no hurry whatsoever to end his life of training and competing. He'd take the pain and the sleeplessness, even the tormenting uncertainty--anything but life without football.

  He looked into the mirror to check the progress of a deep cut over his nose, and the image of Annie flashed across his mind again like a poorly disguised subliminal advertisement. Then the involuntary question came: How could she? Sorrow leaked into his heart and formed a cold little pool at its bottom. During his days and nights of searching for her it had become acutely clear to him how little he'd really known about Annie. He'd never met her family, or even any of her friends. His search, if you could call it that, had consisted of calling her answering machine until it was full and haunting the places they'd been together. Most nights he'd slept in the seat of his truck across the street from where she lived, silently willing her lights to come on. They never did. If that apartment hadn't had her name on the mailbox he might have honestly wondered if she were anything more than a specter from his dreams.

  At breakfast, Clark loaded one plate with pancakes and eggs and another with fruit. He was the first one to training table, so he said grace by himself then wolfed down his food, eating for survival rather than pleasure. If he didn't gorge himself during the rigorous days of camp he'd lose ten pounds in a week. Two practices a day combined with a rigorous regimen of running and weight lifting burned calories the way a blast furnace eats up tissue paper.

  As he ate, Clark read through his Daily Bread pamphlet and tried unsuccessfully to focus on its message of letting Jesus take your worries away. Instead, all he found himself thinking about was Annie and antihistamines. He remembered a head cold that had afflicted him early in the summer. After he had sniffled for two days Annie had offered him an M&M-shaped pill just before bed.

  "This'll clear your head," she'd told him.

  "Antihistamine?" he had asked.

  When she nodded he had told her his philosophy about things like that. "Tom says that when the body wants to purge itself of something, it does it naturally. If you stop the system, you're just keeping in the things that your body wants to get rid of. You cure the symptoms, but the problem stays."

  "If you don't have the symptoms, then there's no problem," Annie had countered with a mischievous smile.

  Clark had shaken his head and insisted that it was better to let the body have its way, to let the snot run freely from your nose and cough and wheeze the mucus up out of your lungs.

  "You know, Clark," Annie had said, putting her pill back into her purse, "in the nineteenth century, the world's preeminent physicians would bleed you if you were ill. Kinda the same idea. They thought the body needed to purge its ill humors. Well, they were fools. No one denies that now."

  Her words had hung there, inviting Clark to come to his own conclusions. She had done things like that from time to time, and Clark now presumed he should have sensed the broader implications. He should have known. But then, she had been baptized, and hadn't that absolved any faults she might have had to that time? It should have, and that was part of the reason why he just couldn't let it go.

  Clark crossed the street that separated the Quinta Inn from the Juggernauts facility. The traffic at this hour was thin enough so that he didn't need the light, but a dirty stake truck full of Mexican workers roaring down the road forced him to move faster than he wanted so early in the day. In the training room, Clark wrapped a hot pack around his neck and jumped up on a table to get his ankles taped for the morning's practice. By the time he was done, a few of his teammates were beginning to filter in. Clark spent his extra time lifting weights, getting some of it over with in the hope that he could use the extra time he'd have after lunch for a longer nap. Glazed in sweat from the weights, Clark then dressed out in everything but his shoulder pads and helmet and went to the claustrophobic meeting room to wait for the morning meeting to begin.

  Other running backs began to filter into the room showing varying degrees of discomfort. Some limped, some groaned quietly as they sat down--all were somehow afflicted. Kemp, their position coach, wandered in with a sixteen-ounce foam cup of coffee. The pungent aroma made Clark long for a cup of his own. Everyone looked at the clock. Being late was a finable offense, two hundred dollars a minute and two thousand flat if you went past ten. While most people outside the game thought that kind of money was a pittance, they didn't realize that NFL players got their blood up over a missing single in a forty-two- dollar per diem envelope.

  Trane Jones came in last, moments before the red needle of the second hand reached the top of the clock. He slouched down in a chair in the back corner, ready to pull the bill of his cap down over his eyes the moment the lights went out and the film began. Kemp stood up. His fuzzy gray hair was rumpled and his eyes were baggy and damp from a coach's meeting that had lasted until 4 a. M. He cleared his throat.

  "We got somethin--" he began, only to be cut short by Grid- ley's barging through the door. The head coach, who appeared unaffected by his own marathon meeting, wasted no time on niceties. He marched to the front of the room, yanked down the screen, and took the floor. Kemp sat.

  "We're not getting what I want out of the run game," Gridley began sternly. "You all know that. We talked about it before the scrimmage against Seattle, and we talked about it before this last preseason game against Detroit."

  He glowered around the room, as if somehow each of them had taken part in some clandestine operation to sabotage the run game.

  "That's what stands between us and a championship, gentlemen," Gridley said. He used the term only when he was really coming undone. "And now I know what our problem is . . ."

  "It's not the running," he said triumphantly, his gleaming eyes passing over Trane Jones like the beam of a lighthouse beacon. "No. It's the run blocking! And I don't mean on the line, either. No. You men aren't where we need to be.

  "You men," he began again, then dropped his tone and said, "and look, let's not bullshit around, Clark, you aren't making it happen . . ."

  Clark's face burned crimson and his ears rang as if someone had fired a pistol too close to his head. It took everything he had to return Gridley's glare. The shock of the situation left him without the ability to muster an ounce of defiance. His head spun like a tornado, and in its turgid gray walls he could pick out the fragments of little things that had happened leading up to this moment: a missed assignment here, getting beat in a one- on-one drill there, missing a couple practices because of a slight tear in his Achilles tendon. They were the same kind of little signs he should have seen with Annie but hadn't. It made him feel disconnected and dull.

  "Now, starting today, I'm going to personally grade every contact drill you people do, every block you throw. And ... if someone in this room can't start opening some seams for our runners . . . Well, I've already got scouts searching the wire."


  Gridley went to the door, but instead of leaving he snapped off the lights and sat down next to the Beta machine. He clattered with the tape from yesterday's practice until Kemp finally got up and helped him guide it into the machine.

  "Now, we're going to look at this together," Gridley said, hunching over in his chair with his head eagerly turned up toward the screen. "This is from yesterday. Okay, first play. Kemp, what's this play? Where's the script?"

  Kemp fumbled in the dark with his papers and held the script up to the screen at an angle as he dipped his head.

  "First play is. . . forty-four dive."

  "Okay, forty-four dive."

  A bird's-eye view of the field appeared and zoomed in on the area of the field where they were going through the inside run drill. The Juggernauts defenders were draped in loose-fitting red pinnies and showed the alignment typically used by the Giants' 4-3 defense. The film ran on. The offense came to the line and Clark got the handoff. He busted up through the middle of the drill and ran twenty yards into the end zone. Someone in the dark room cleared his throat, and Clark couldn't help looking back, in the hope of some contrite acknowledgment if not praise, toward the projector where Gridley sat.

  "We're not going to win any championships building a run game around a forty-four dive!" Gridley roared, sensing the mutiny. "A shit throw-away play to run out the clock!"

  No one said a word.

  The next play was the double reverse. Trane went in motion wide. Clark led the way for Faulkner. Featherfield got the reverse.

  Trane took it on the double and was soon roaring up Clark's backside at full speed. The strong safety, who'd seen the play a hundred times throughout training camp, immediately broke for the sideline. Instead of sealing the safety to the inside as the play was designed, Clark got up under his pads and rode him full steam toward the sideline, thinking Trane could easily break back inside for a touchdown. But instead of working off Clark's improvisation, Trane tried to outrace the two of them to the sideline, where the safety knocked him out of bounds for a one-yard loss.

  "Fucking pitiful!" Gridley barked. He began to rewind the sequence in slow motion and let it play back and forth as he spoke.

  "Clark! What does this play call for?"

  Clark knew where they were going and like a good soldier he simply took out his sword and fell on it.

  "I'm supposed to block the safety back to the inside," he said flatly.

  "Exactly! And where did you block him?"

  "Outside."

  "Horseshit! Cowshit! Bullshit! This sucks!"

  Gridley was on his feet again and slamming the remote onto the tabletop, where it blew apart.

  "Fix it, goddammit! Fix it!" he screamed. "Or heads will roll! Heads will roll!"

  With that, the head coach stomped out of the room and slammed the door. Everyone sat in the dark for several moments silently examining their fingers and hands before Kemp got up and quietly and pathetically said, "Okay men. Let's fix it."

  Clark looked back sympathetically at the older man and realized his ass was on the line as much as Clark's. The only one without apparent concern was Trane Jones. Gridley was either too scared or too embarrassed to put the onus on Trane. He was making more than everybody in the room put together, and even though the truth was obvious to the rest of them, it wasn't being addressed. If Trane spent a little more time paying attention to what the hell was going on he might be in sync with the rest of the team and they might actually get the run game on track. No one was chewing his ass up, though. No one was willing to say the emperor had no clothes. As the film began to run and Kemp did his best to sound authoritative, Clark stole a look back at Trane, who was splayed out like a dead man and breathing heavily from the efforts of sleep.

  Chapter 22

  Trane let his engine run. Phatt Momma's was the hottest club in L. A., and that meant there were valets to park VIPs' cars. Cubby and Leshay, two of his homeboys, got out of the red Mercedes with him, sunglasses on just like their patron and baggy pants hanging halfway down their asses. Homeboys were like pilot fish and Trane was the shark. They lived in his mansion with him, ate his food, and drove his cars. Their ride was free. Gold rope chains and medallions jingled together like sleigh bells. Cameras flashed from behind the velvet ropes, and Trane flashed back the finger, sticking out his tongue at the same time. He was into it. L. A. was his kind of town.

  Inside, the music pounded their ears in thick waves. The flashing lights and smoke and the milling throng of people were like an acid trip. The head of security had a blond crew cut. He was a musclehead in a black T-shirt two sizes too small in the arms. He grinned foolishly at Trane and brought his hand briefly to his mouth to speak into his headset before leading them through part of the bar and up a purple set of stairs to the VIP room. Inside, there was less noise, but still enough so Trane had to lean toward Leshay and yell into his ear to get some drinks. Fresh cool air flowed through the room, a pleasant reprieve from the choke they'd been treated to downstairs.

  Trane and Cubby tossed themselves down on a green leather couch in the corner of the room. Glass, floor to ceiling, allowed them to look out into the main bar and all its life forms. There were blacks and Mexicans, dykes and bikers, fags and muscle- heads, hippies and suits, all crawling over the top of each other like a swarm of locusts. Leshay appeared with a short-skirted cocktail waitress in tow. She set down six ice-frosted tumblers of vodka, and after flashing Trane some hardware of her own, a chain link through her tongue, she walked away with her high round ass switching.

  "Let that bitch suck my cock," Trane admitted. "Leshay, get that bitch right back here."

  Leshay sipped the top off his drink before rising and pursuing the waitress. Trane took a mouthful of his own drink and watched Cubby snort some coke off the back of his hand then dust off his nose with a thumb. When he turned his head he was staring into the bronzed thighs of a goddess in a leather mini. His eyes groped their way up to her face and her long blond hair. Those features were equally impressive despite an angry little downturned lip. Her hair was blown out like the mane of a lion and her lips were painted the color of pink candy.

  "That's my seat," she said.

  Trane leaned back into the couch and let his elbows sink in the leather. He smiled up at her.

  "Fuck you, bitch," he said in a friendly tone.

  "Aren't you charming?" she replied with a false smile. "But that's my drink in front of you, so why don't you find someplace else?"

  Trane noticed a drink marred by pink lipstick, a milky White Russian that he hadn't seen before.

  "Why don't you sit right down on this, baby?" Trane raised his eyebrows above the tops of his glasses and wagged his pierced tongue at her.

  "Here," she said, picking up her drink and dumping it into his lap. "This'll cool you down."

  The girl snapped around to walk away, but Trane was on his feet with his hand on her upper arm before she could go a step. He spun her back fast and pulled her into his muscular frame so that he could feel her breasts against his abdomen and smell her tangy perfume.

  "You're hurting me," she said, speaking in a quiet seductive whimper that let him know she liked it.

  "Yeah, you want that, too, don't ya, baby?" he said, the words spilling from his mouth instinctively and without calculation.

  She let him press her even tighter and looked up into his sunglasses with a crooked smile. "Maybe I do," she whispered in the same small voice.

  He wasn't sure, but it seemed like she had flicked her hips against his leg.

  "Let's go," Trane said, his own throaty voice thick with excitement.

  "No," she said huskily. "Let's stay. Let's drink and dance and think about it . . . We can talk about it, about what you're going to do to me ... I like to talk about it. . ."

  Trane's smile spread even wider.

  In the morning she was gone. Trane's blood raced just remembering. Him knocking her around, tying her up, her liking it all. Then for her to just be gone?
He got up and parted the curtains. The driveway was littered with new cars, but they all belonged to him. She was really gone. When had that ever happened to him before? It hadn't. Occasionally women had acted independent, even haughty. But none had followed through and simply left him before the sun came up.

  "That was a bitch," he said to himself appreciatively.

  Chapter 23

  The sun shone beneath the clouds over the western lip of the Coliseum. Still, the rain fell with a steady hiss. Emerald cut grass clung to the soggy socks that sagged down the backs of the players' calves. Sweat mixed with the rain and washed sandy grit into uncomfortable spots between pads and skin. Even though the rain was warm, any wet weather was unusual for late September in L. A. Whether it would pass or not didn't matter anymore. The field was saturated. So was the tape wrapped tightly around every digit of Clark's fingers to reinforce his knuckles. Only eleven seconds remained on the clock, and it was running down. The Juggernauts were five points behind. They had no time-outs left, but they were on the 49ers' four-yard line.

  Faulkner called the last play from the line of scrimmage. "Blue, blue, blue!" he shouted. The thinned-out home crowd was as quiet as the tension of the moment would allow. They knew their team needed to hear the play called by the quarterback at the line of scrimmage.

  "Red Rover Cali strong! Red Rover Cali strong!"

  The Juggernauts offense scrambled to their respective positions. Trane Jones set up in split backs to the strong side of the formation, leaving Clark the spot to the left.

  "Yju go weak!" Clark barked at him.

  "Fuck you, motherfucker!" Trane told him as he anchored into his stance.

  Clark jumped toward him. He'd push the dumb son of a bitch to the right spot if he had to. A quick glance at the clock told him if he didn't get lined up the clock would run out anyway. Clark jumped back to the weak side, the wrong place for the fullback with the play that was called. The weak back was the one who was supposed to go out over the middle and catch a pop pass in the end zone. The strong back was the one who had to pick up the blitzing linebacker.